Don’t want workers to think of you as garbage? Try not being garbage.
AS ALWAYS, LIFE IN THE 21st CENTURY IMITATES MONTY PYTHON’S FLYING CIRCUS: Life Imitates Monty Python, An Actual Dead Parrot Lawsuit!
Undercover Cops Arrest 2 Women for Operating Home Beauty Businesses In Violation of Coronavirus Lockdown Order
COVERUP: CHINA IS DESPERATE HERE. China has threatened to stop importing wine and beef from Australia if the Morrison government continues to push for an inquiry into the origin of the global coronavirus outbreak.
Instapundit: "I don’t think China is in a position to stop importing food right now. But the more vigorously and obviously they try to cover up the origins of the disease, the more obvious the answer becomes."
Instapundit: "I don’t think China is in a position to stop importing food right now. But the more vigorously and obviously they try to cover up the origins of the disease, the more obvious the answer becomes."
GREG BAILEY. COVID-19 and Tax Havens
Now that three governments in the EU have announced that during the COVID-19 crisis they will give no government funding to companies registered in tax havens, we wait to see if this prohibition is continued after the crisis is over. Will it be extended to countries beyond the EU, especially those in the Anglo-Celtic sphere? Continue reading
JOHN TAN. Covid-19, news media: Not enough questions.
Crisis; a virus-threat. These are causes of great concern, but not an excuse for lack of curiosity in the news media. Continue reading
Just remember, the people who want to be publicly naked are almost never the people you want to see undressed.
New York Times, The Tax-Break Bonanza Inside the Economic Rescue Package:
The price of US crude has gone negative for the first time in history. How did it happen – and what does it mean?
Prices went negative — meaning that anyone trying to sell a barrel would have to pay a buyer $30 — in part because of the way oil is traded. Futures contracts that require buyers to take ...
Mr Tehan, who was on the Q+A panel with Deputy Chief Medical Officer Nick Coatsworth, NSW...
Three of New Zealand's 19 Covid-19 deaths have been linked to CHT St Margarets. There was the...
China seizes over 89 million shoddy face masks Agence France Presse
The cheering-up business
Actor,
winemaker, "duck dad" and occasional ukulele player, this is how Sam
Neill is keeping spirits high in times of COVID-19 isolation.
IView Australian Story ABC
IView Australian Story ABC
The suggestion that MEdia Dragon gave the taste of Social Media to Sam and Laura on 99 acres during the Byron Bay Writers Festival last year is exaggerated ;-)
Behind the scenes of Australian Story's program on actor Sam Neill
Two of Australia's top education officials have warned the nation's universities could suffer for generations to come if they do not receive more funding from the federal government, in a Q+A episode featuring some of the tensest sparring yet over the reopening of schools.
NSW Department of Education secretary Mark Scott and University of Sydney deputy vice-chancellor Lisa Jackson Pulver urged the federal government to bolster its support for the tertiary education sector, which was handed an $18 billion rescue package by Education Minister Dan Tehan two weeks ago.
This 3-D Simulation Shows Why Social Distancing Is So Important - The New York Times – “Public health experts and elected officials have emphasized again and again that social distancing is the best tool we have to slow the coronavirus outbreak. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention encourages people to stay home. If you must venture out, you should stay at least six feet away from others. The World Health Organization recommends a minimum of three feet of separation. Scientists are learning about the novel coronavirus in real time, and those who study similar respiratory illnesses say that until it is better understood, no guideline is likely to offer perfect safety. Instead, understanding the possible transmission routes for the virus can help us see why keeping our distance is so important. See How to Social Distance in Your Space: We used augmented reality to show you how social distancing guidelines can apply in real life: at the grocery store, on the sidewalk, or anywhere else. See the video of this here. To experience this in your space, you will need to use the NYTimes iOS App on a newer iPhone or iPad…”
Barrister Claire Quentin (writing as David Quentin at the time) very clearly expressed this in an article on the role of tax advisers which she summarised in this diagram:
A client meeting an accountant for the first time does so at a point midpoint on the Y axis. They do not know what to do to get their business going. The chance that they will make a mistake is high. A good accountant can massively reduce their risk and improve considerably the chance that the person will be tax compliant by driving them up that access by simply ensuring that they comply with all the right tax rules. The risk in the business and for society as a whole is reduced as a result, which is precisely why good accountants are useful.Chief Medical Officer says Australia is 'the safest place in the world' from coronavirus
Brendan Murphy gives a glowing appraisal of the country's coronavirus response, saying cases in the Northern Territory and ACT are so low "that there's no statistical purpose in showing them".
Singapore thought they were beating coronavirus. But they had a blind spot
While Singapore was being praised for its meticulous coronavirus containment strategies, some argued that initial measures failed to address a key area that has now led to a spike in cases. Here's what happened.
Analysis: Joe is one of 48,900 Americans to die from coronavirus. His daughter says Fox News played a role
Fox News hosts downplayed coronavirus well into March and continue to dilute the truth, putting American lives at risk, writes David Lipson.
‘They Are Transporting This Virus’: MTA Subway Conductors Say Trains Are Filthier Than Ever Amid Coronavirus Pandemic.
IT’S THE SNARL OF A CORNERED RAT: China’s diplomats show teeth in defending virus response.
From Asia to Africa, London to Berlin, Chinese envoys have set off diplomatic firestorms with a combative defense whenever their country is accused of not acting quickly enough to stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.They belong to a new generation of “Wolf Warrior” diplomats, named after patriotic blockbuster films starring a muscle-bound Chinese commando killing American bad guys in Africa and Southeast Asia with his bare hands.
But cornered rats can be dangerous.
‘They Are Transporting This Virus’: MTA Subway Conductors Say Trains Are Filthier Than Ever Amid Coronavirus Pandemic.
NOT JUST CORONAVIRUS: Communist China’s Coronavirus Disinformation Campaign May Be Bigger Than We Realized.
Germans are not Swedes are not Americans, but (original):
1/ This email came from a German reader. To summarize: on April 15 the official German public health/disease control institute published a paper showing that moderate social distancing reduced #SARS_CoV2 spread but the hard lockdown was useless. https://t.co/CstwbAwOfPpic.twitter.com/UDpMu3MNXd— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) April 19, 2020
Flattening the curve won’t lead to coronavirus turning point, study finds South China Morning Post
SUSPECTED OF DISTURBING PUBLIC ORDER: Sounds like a charge Adam Schiff would level at Deven Nunes. Or Instapundit. Chinese citizen journalist Li Zehua was actually detained and quarantined for allegedly disturbing public order.
From the BBC:
Li Zehua is a citizen journalist who went to Wuhan in February, after another journalist, Chen Qiushi, went missing. In his first video from Wuhan he explained why we was there.“Before I entered Wuhan, a friend who worked in the Chinese mainstream media told me… all the bad news about the epidemic has been collected by the central government.“The local media can only report the good news about the patients’ recovery and so on. Of course, it remains uncertain whether that’s true, because this is just what I heard from my friends.”His stories included an alleged cover-up of infections, and a busy crematorium. They were watched millions of times on Chinese platforms, YouTube, and Twitter.
Read about his dreadful February 26. Li has reappeared. Other citizen journalists have not, including Chen.
RELATED: The saga of Dr. Li Wenliang, who died of Wuhan virus on February 6, is a revealing and brutal introduction to the CCP’s Public Security Bureau. If you haven’t read it by now (I linked to it yesterday and again this morning), my latest Creators Syndicate column essays the CCP’s Imperial World Order. The sagas of Dr. Li and citizen journalist Li demonstrate the CCP-IWO is just another tyrannical police state. Except it’s got cash and operates a global agitation-propaganda network that can slick Western media sensationalists and other useful idiots.
When ‘non-essential’ is anything but - The Hill – “Demarcations of “essential” versus “non-essential” services should not prevent the growth of creative efforts to leverage “non-essential” services against the pandemic and its rippling consequences. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, most local governments have decided to close their library buildings in order to ensure the safety of library staff and patrons. But libraries should not be put on the bench just because their buildings are closed. Historically, librarians have much to offer in response to emergencies. In the days after the Ferguson shooting, the Ferguson Municipal Public Library provided ad-hoc school for students whose schools had closed. In the days after Hurricane Sandy, the Queens Library helped people fill out relief forms and hosted nurses whose medical facilities had been destroyed by the storm to provide outpatient services. In my own work with libraries around the world, I have seen librarians on the front lines of political and natural disasters. In Haiti, after the earthquake in 2010, librarians helped first-responders connect to the information they needed to do their jobs.Libraries are offering similarly critical resources in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, even though their buildings are now closed. The Central Library of Arlington in Virginia temporarily converted to a warehouse to receive donations of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for first responders. The Toronto Public Library has turned library branches into food banks to help feed the city’s most vulnerable. The Rochester Public Library in Minnesota has turned one of their buildings into a day-shelter
“New Seismic Map of North America Reveals a Continent Under Tremendous Stress,” George Dvorsky, Gizmodo.
Changes in Grocery Shopping Habits During COVID-19 - C+R Research: “With social distancing guidelines and shelter-in-place orders being implemented due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the way consumers shop for their groceries has changed. In order to limit contact, many are taking precautions such as ordering groceries through delivery apps or making less trips to the grocery store
“Here at the Internet Archive, we’re always ready to celebrate the important role that libraries play in our schools, communities, and larger society. This year, however, National Library Week comes during a tumultuous time, when thousands of physical libraries are closed or inaccessible…
JHU Hub: “Johns Hopkins University has launched a free online course for the general public about COVID-19 featuring experts from across the university—including those on the front lines of research and treatment—sharing the latest insights and evidence about the disease, its spread, and ways to stay healthy. Published on the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center website as the outbreak develops, the course, titledUnderstanding the COVID-19 Pandemic, is broken into a series of lesson modules. Thefirst module draws from the expertise of Claire Marie Filone, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, whose research focuses on the behaviors of dangerous viruses when they infect humans and animals. The second module, released Sunday, features Jason Farley, an infectious disease-trained nurse epidemiologist from the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, who discusses diagnosing, treating, and preventing COVID-19…”
With Millions Unable to Pay for Housing Next Month, Organizers Plan the Largest Rent Strike in Nearly a Century The Intercept. For which the Sanders “movement” should be raising money ffs, even if Sanders believes electoralism is the right strategy.How Infectious Disease Shaped American Bathroom Design NPR
‘Heads we win, tails you lose’: how America’s rich have turned pandemic into profit Guardian
Millions of credit card customers can’t pay their bills and lenders are bracing for the impact MarketWatch
Millions of People Will Face Stimulus Check Delays Simply Because They Are Poor Truthout
African Americans Make Up All of Richmond Coronavirus Deaths Virginia Public Media
The Ruling Class Does Not Rule Jacobin. “The key idea becomes a division of labor between those who accumulate capital and those who manage the state apparatus.” Well worth a read.
Pandemics of the Past and Future: A Conversation with Nobelist David Baltimore Caltech